I would much rather see comparisons to safe/prudent drivers vs the average. Try to sell me autopilot as being as safe or marginally better than the average driver and I'll never use that shit - the average driver sucks.
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/13/1142598789/drivers-crashes-dr...
Would you trust a self driving vehicle to attempt to drive your family into safety?
If not, then you probably got some food for thought about averages.
I get what you’re saying though. I’ve been driving for 20 years, have had a single accident (rear ended at a stop light, not really my fault), no moving violations, and have driven about ~300,000 miles total (sounds like a lot but I was a full time lyft driver for a bit).
I’m positive I’m an outlier but I’d also trust myself a lot more than some of the current autonomous vehicles. I’d still assume with AI assistance or partial autonomy, I’d be safer on average though.
Yes, that is the paradigm unfolding here. That is indeed one of the many critical attractions of self driving vehicles.
>The reckless drivers will shun self driving because they want to show off and have fun.
First, this is your unsourced head canon. People with drinking problems, cognitive impairment (both temporary and permanent), etc seem likely to be a far bigger percentage.
But it doesn't matter, because they won't get the choice, which again is one of the core aspects of self driving vehicles. Right now, human driving in America is a quasi-right because it's currently intrinsically tied to "personal arbitrary time/space mechanized transportation". I say "quasi-right" because while legally it's not formally a codified right or in the Constitution or something, as a practical matter if most of the population wasn't able to drive the country would fall apart. And that is recognized by government, both executive/legislative and judicial. Losing driving rights would be a major burden for tens of millions people and would disrupt their ability to get or retain jobs, in turn causing other societal expense. So traditionally government is quite hesitant to wield that stick and almost never preemptively.
Self-driving though would decouple human driving from someone having their own car and ability to have it take them where they want, when they want like right now. That in turn would completely change to political dynamics. Driving would truly become a privilege, and getting a license could become much more like class C licenses or professional emergency responder licenses or the like are. Much, much more serious training and testing, continuing ed requirements as with other professions, and much easier to lose. Because unlike right now, losing one's drivers license won't mean losing the ability to use a car. Anyone who acts recklessly at all, even if there is no damage of any kind, can just preemptively have their license rescinded until at a minimum remediation is completed. Because driving will just be a hobby.
That long tail of outlier clipping works on an individual human basis, too. How many accidents happen because an individual careful driver is, momentaritly, inanttentive?
It depends. I doubt it because the distribution needs to be considered. Replacing average drivers either an average system yields no benefit. If it's applied to both tails equally, then you haven't moved the average either, juar made it more homogeneous. You'd have to target the highest risk groups to make the impact. Many in those groups can't afford or won't adopt the tech - the elderly, low income (or less educated depending on the study), or young males mostly.
The better ways to target only the problematic tail is stricter testing, better education, and possibly permemant interlock devices for DUI offenders.
"How many accidents happen because an individual careful driver is, momentaritly, inanttentive?"
My guess would be probably about as often as autonomous systems screw up in novel environments.
If other drivers would not yield to robocar, it may get stuck on intersection forever. Robocars have no assertiveness to push themselves into traffic.
Not surprising.
> To scale up, they would need to drive less conservatively
Can you quantify this? I think that self-driving cars should drive conservatively. Human drivers who are aggressive or risk taking are idiots even if they get to where they are going on time.
Driverless cars should drive like public transport buses (at least around here) / school buses. Conservative, slower than you would like and safe.
For example, if they need to make a lane change for a turn on a congested street, they will wait for someone to let them in rather than “pushing” their way in like a human driver (especially a bus driver) would. When that inevitably doesn’t happen, they are forced to go around the block and try again.
That exact behavior happened during the “Uber” ride I took on a Waymo, and it is possible they have improved since then.
If you compare a traffic light intersection where there is a clear moment at which you should stop or continue with a roundabout where you need to make a judgement call; being overly conservative would mean stopping at the roundabout until there is 0 traffic.
There was a discussion on this in ep 454 of Freakonomics radio.
I agree, but the specifics get tricky. It is possible to drive so conservatively that it’s unpredictable and therefore dangerous.
I’ve known some terrible conservative drivers in my time; I was a passenger with someone who stopped abruptly in an intersection despite having a green light because they were afraid someone else was going to run the red (while it’s fair to say the person who rear-ended us was at fault, it was an accident that would not happen with a more normal driver).
Maybe I’m nit picking on the difference between conservative and unsurprising.
They would likely have to setup in a Northern location and run their cars in that location for a while. Also need to update their simulations to account for snow and icy roads. So more complex driving models and more challenging road detection.
Sometimes there is light snow over the whole road and there are no markings. You just have to position yourself relative to street signs or ditches where you think your lane is.
Autonomous vehicles are good at making routine repeatable decisions based on clear data. I'm not sure how we can sense and input this sort of data clearly enough.
I think weather conditions can also predict road conditions pretty well. And the combine that with historical data on where things were slippery, I bet you can create a pretty good model of what conditions to expect across a driving environment.
Although in Canada, sometimes all roads in a city are just horrid - dozens of cars in ditches or hitting each other because no one can stop. And maybe in those cases, autonomous vehicles should refuse to drive until it is improved.
When someone new moves into town, someone will typically explain to them to watch for where the sun hits the ground in winter. Where that happens on a steep slope, avoid driving there when there is snow. Before they know to do this, a human will attempt to climb that hill, not make progress because of the ice, back down, and try another route. This is a rural area without much traffic, so conditions might change significantly between "real-time" updates.
So, we have human drivers "zooming out" in a couple of ways... in time/context (observing conditions that lead to certain routes becoming high risk) and in problem resolution (try another route). This is quite different from what is currently being tried algorithmically.
LLMs are so good because they have almost the entire digitized text output of humanity available for training. They may not always provide factually correct information, but it is dished out in near perfect English (or whichever language you prefer).
Personally i think if we want to recreate a human driver full AGI is needed. But, in the right conditions current autonomous cars will work well. They just need some external helpers, like being geo-fenced to a set of roads which have all the correct sign posts and markings.
Not every human driver can solve every situation that the best human driver can solve. Also, the most dangerous situations happen at high speed, which humans aren't great at handling unless we've had a lot of training. The main reason I'm optimistic about autonomous cars is that a system like Waymo's will only get better and better over the years. And newly produced cars will be just as good as "experienced" cars.
This is a mantra from speed limit fans. There are a lot of dangerous situations happening at low speed (bicicle coming from left in an intersection, children playing )
...that makes the human driver, who normally would get say 10k miles of practice every year will drive... 500 miles on average.
It really does need to be "car can do all of the driving", or else it will be putting people that have zero practice in those hard situations it can't handle.
Unlike in SW, choosing a different path might lead to accidents.
My car can keep the lane very good in a sunny day, when the sin shines from above (i.e. midday).
In heavy rain or snow, i can rely only on my senses.
For an automatic driving car to be useful, it must function correctly in 100 % of the cases (ok, 99,999 %).
Maybe making the point of comparison with professional drivers in fleet cars would be more accurate, but I doubt that data is available.
I raise this because the pool of people buying a Tesla is different than the full driver pool. There is likely serious sampling bias in this pool of drivers due to demographics, geographics, etc..
I've noticed a lot of automation legally still require a warm body to take the blame. Seems like eating your cake and having it too.
Waymo are driving, there is no warm body, in accidents where a Waymo self driving taxi struck somebody that's on Waymo, you're just a passenger the same as if you were in a New York cab, or a Uber, or if an A320 you're sat in smacks into a post because the pilots took a corner too close. You're not the one who needs insurance, because you're not driving, Waymo is.
Even Waymo still has some safety drivers per the article linked. And if we are going to constrain our analysis to self driving pilot programs, then we need to constrain the comparison to the same geofenced area. Arguably there are not a lot of fatal accidents per 1M miles on the local roads of Phoenix/SanFran by human drivers either.
Do you have any source for that? As far as I'm aware, there simply isn't enough public data released to actually make an unbiased comparison here. So whichever side of this you're on, you can always twist the data to confirm your point of view. Only when Tesla and all other carmakers begin to hand out all of their data, we will get a useful comparison.
Once they scale up, they will be encountering more other Waymo cars on the roads, eliminating a lot of the accidents where someone else crashed into Waymo, or made an upredictable move. So then they could afford to drive less conservatively.
We are pretty sure that our roads would be much safer if all cars were self-driving, but that cannot happen overnight and there will be an interim phase when robo-cars have to mix with human drivers, which is the hard engineering challenge.
1) It's very important to do an apples to apples to comparison when you're looking at accident rates, and you can't just do that by looking at averages for the US for all miles traveled. There have been issues with numbers for Tesla autopilot before where it looked like autopilot was safer than it was because Tesla compare autopilot against the average accident rates for all miles driven but in reality for the types of situations where autopilot was used, human drivers actually had fewer accidents on average.
2) Waymo has a low accident rate because its vehicles are operating very conservatively right now. If it could scale up and still operate the same way, that wouldn't be an issue, but its vehicles are already causing problems by getting stuck which suggests that it wouldn't be practical for them to operate a significantly larger number of vehicles the way they are operating right now. To scale up, they would need to drive less conservatively, and in that case they very likely would not be safe in their current state. IMO, this means it isn't really meaningful to say that they're "already safer" than human drivers.